Description

Scope

In recent years, different research communities developed methodologies and tools for capturing, processing, analysing, transmitting and enabling the remote fruition of objects, environments and bio-entities. Terms like immersive telecommunications are typically used for specifying this body of activities.

Applications of immersive telecommunications technologies can be various, and include industrial automation, health care, education, and entertainment.

Different research communities are involved in immersive technologies. We can divide them into traditional Multimedia, Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, and Mixed/Augmented Reality. Each of them has its own set of techniques for capturing, processing, transmitting and interacting/rendering.

IMMERSCOM intends to bridge the traditional gap existing between immersive technologies and networking, focusing is on how traditional and emerging fields (e.g. pervasive computing) can be brought together under the networking umbrella.

This in turn could also give a boost to the related standardization activities.

In the last two decades, it has been mostly the traditional multimedia research field (2D digital video and audio) the one which received the attention from both the networking and the multimedia communities. Thanks to their joint work, a wide range of tools and supports were developed, enabling the commercial world-wide deployment of multimedia based services and products. All the related research and standardization activities enabled multimedia data to be adapted to different networking technologies, wired and wireless, established and emerging, with different and time-varying channel conditions. Also the restrictions due to the terminal processing power of handheld devices are on the way to be successfully overcome.

On the other hand, computer graphics, computer vision and virtual/augmented reality communities have often developed conceptual models and tools working separately, mainly for fulfilling local and specific needs of predefined contexts. For instance computer vision has often aimed at performing specific tasks (e.g. tracking, object recognition) in some specific scenarios (e.g. providing localization and visualization for robotic application or video surveillance). Computer graphics has developed a set of tools, such as rendering and texturing, which have been mainly applied to animation and games and, more in general, in the entertainment industry, mainly aiming to a local use, though forms of remote collaborative environment (such as 3D gaming) are starting to take off the ground. Similar approaches have been followed so far by virtual/augmented reality research community.

Beside the regular sessions, IMMERSCOM will also inlcude in its program satellite workshops and special events in order to allow the representatives of specific industrial sectors to show their vision and applications, bringing theory and practice together and thereafter building the bridges.

Summarizing, strategic objectives of IMMERSCOM are:

* Introduce of networking as the instrument for the remote fruition of immersive multimedia content.

* Assess the sensing, processing, transmission and fruition technologies currently available for immersive telecommunication applications.

* Promote interdisciplinary flow of technical information among industry systems designers and researchers with feedback from the end users.